


The Walpurgisnacht Arc

by Phoebe_Zeitgeist



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-01
Updated: 2011-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:21:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoebe_Zeitgeist/pseuds/Phoebe_Zeitgeist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed": Homura builds a memorial.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Walpurgisnacht Arc

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



"The true enemy is entropy," Kyubei has said, and Homura knows he is right. Time and change, and the price of change: those are enemies Madoka could not defeat. There’s a flaw in the heart of the world, one not even Madoka’s sacrifice could heal; _entropy_ is as good a name for it as any. And the darkness that once turned Puella Magi to witches breeds demons now; here as in the old world Puella Magi arise, make their wishes, and become warriors and protectors.

In this new world Puella Magi go to their ends without despair; and Homura, who alone among them knew the despair of the world that was, understands the greatness of Madoka's gift to them. But still they leave the world, and they leave it young; as before, they leave no bodies behind them to prove to the world that they were real, that they lived and loved and gave up their lives to protect what they cared for. Often enough they do not even leave memories in the hearts of the living. As before the Puella Magi are made from those who are willing to trade their souls and lives away for a wish; and as Sayaka Miki saw from the beginning, it is the unfortunate and the unloved who have the most need of wishes. They depart in joy when their times come: Homura has seen it, and she knows that her friends and companions in the great battle go without concern for whether the world remembers them. But Homura remembers Madoka weeping at the thought that no one save the Puella Magi themselves would know Tomoe Mami was dead, and knows that for all Madoka has done for them all, the absence of memory would be bitter to her.

Homura is the strongest of the Puella Magi now. Her soul gem burns with the splendour of the noonday sun, and Kyubey tells her that she has years before it will dim, years in which there might be something more than the endless fight. But she is no goddess, to fix that which not even Madoka could alter. Yet they are all little Madokas now – her early convent-school education comes back to her, whispering of saints, and _imitatio dei_ – and she carries the world's memory of them. So she builds a memorial.

Fittingly, it’s Kanome Tatsuya, the other person in this world who remembers Madoka, who gives her the idea. His drawings of her had a charm and a life to them, captured something of her presence in a few quick lines. Homura can draw, just as she can run now, and do higher mathematics in her head, and read English and Chinese. Telling a story in the panels of a manga is just one more small thing to learn.

 _Puella Magi Madoka Magica_ debuts the year that Miki Sayaka leaves them. Homura uses her name, as she uses the names of the others; after all that’s the point, and she doesn’t thing they’d mind. (Miki, who reflexively opposed anything Homura suggested in this world, as in all the others, might have; but Miki is gone, and she too deserves to be remembered.) Anyway, they’ll probably never see it, Homura thinks. They study and they fight; who has time for the latest manga releases?

Kyubei could tell them, but the Incubator is as alien now as his people have always been, and he would never think of it. He’s fascinated by the story, though, as he was when Homura first told him of the world that Madoka changed. He sits on her shoulder to watch her sketch out her panels, then draw and ink them, and comments occasionally on the physics of her alternate universe. It’s helpful, really. Homura can tell all their old stories from memory: there are scenes where every word any of them ever spoke come back to her clear as if she had them recorded, in a hundred variations from a hundred times and worlds. But she needs new stories to mingle with the old, stories of witches fought and victories won and people saved from darkness. It’s harder to make things up than it is to remember, but Kyubei has a longer memory of the Puella Magi than Homura, even if his memories are of a different universe, and he finds stories to tell her, things she can use. If it troubles him to be cast as the villain in the series, he doesn’t show it.

"Akemi Homura," he asks, "why do you never write about yourself?" She almost smiles. The question is honest, innocent and unanswerable; the truth is about love, and love is beyond an Incubator’s understanding.

"Because it’s not my story," she tells him. "Not yet."

She doesn’t expect that her manga will be more than modestly successful. That’s enough to satisfy her: all she cares for is that the story be told, the names and faces of the Puella Magi who fought and wept with Madoka, and Madoka herself, be remembered in this world. But the world surprises her, and takes Madoka and her companions to its heart. There are bound volumes, and then occasional cosplayers, and ever-growing sales figures. In the year that Tomoe Mami departs work begins on an anime adaptation.

It’s only a few months after Mami leaves them that Sakura Kyoko discovers the series.

"Why did you have to make Sayaka such a _bitch_?" Kyoko demands. "Okay, you never liked each other, but she’s gone. You didn’t need to hold a fucking grudge." Friendship or no, it’s the last thing Homura would have expected her to be angry about. She can feel herself staring at Kyoko, and realizes that her own mouth has fallen open in sheer astonishment.

"Because I wanted to remember _Sayaka,"_ she finally manages to say. "She was loyal and fierce and true to her principles no matter how hard it was for her, and her friends loved her. And she was a total bitch, Kyoko, you know that."

"Yeah," Kyoko says. "I guess." She’s quiet for a few minutes, her face sullen. "She did keep trying to kill me that first year we met," she adds at last. " _Bitch._ " Then she starts to laugh, and gives Homura one of her apricots, and punches her in the shoulder. "Thanks for always making sure I have enough to eat, anyway. That was what I wanted to say when I started running my mouth, you know?"

She tells Homura about her parents that day. Homura already knows the story, of course, from too many universes, but this is the first one where Kyoko has trusted her enough to tell it to her. It feels better than Homura had expected. She retells the story in the manga, but this time she asks Kyoko’s permission first.

In that same year the time comes at last for her to enter the story. She should have published under a pseudonym, she thinks now; but she had never expected a wide audience, or one that would pay attention to the mangaka. So she alone appears under an invented name, as though she were no more than a character in a story. The aesthetic flaw troubles her at first, and Kyoko argues with her about it, but in the end she decides that it’s better so. "No one should build her own monument," she tells Kyoko, and asks for her help; and Kyoko names her Ijiri Haruka.

Her soul gem is still bright when Kyoko departs, turning to her last and greatest foe with a smile so radiant with love that Homura's eyes dazzle and her vision blurs. It has been many years, and many worlds, since Homura minded fighting alone. But in that year she announces the end of the series, and begins work on the Walpurgis arc. Her audience reacts to the news with a dismay that would gratify any creator. Homura finds herself grateful for it: in mourning the end of the series the fans are mourning Madoka along with her. At long last she has companions in her grief, however little they know it. That some of them blame her, and urge her to reconsider as if she had the power to make the world right again, is a small price to pay.

"No story lasts forever," she tells an interviewer. "It’s time. And I’ve known from the beginning how this one ends."

There are screening parties for each of the last four episodes, so that the cast and crew can gather and watch together as they air. Homura knows she should be there, to show her collaborators that she values them and the time they’ve had together, but she knows herself better. Her colleagues would congratulate her, and applaud, and the coldness in her own face would match the coldness in her avatar Haruka's; it would be unkind, and they would never understand.

In the end she watches these last episodes alone, or with Kyubei for company, in the same room where years ago, and in many different worlds and times, she has studied the Walpurgisnacht, made plans to fight it alone and with allies, has struggled with Kyubei and begged Madoka to reject his contract no matter what the price.. It’s strange to watch these episodes, just as it was strange to draw and ink the manga versions. Not just because to do it she has to look at the scenes of her life from somewhere other than behind her own eyes, to stand apart outside her own body, though that’s disorienting and new. She’s told made-up stories before, as filler, and she’s told the true stories as she knew them. But here, for the first time, she’s telling one she knows is real, for which she has no memory.

It’s toward the end of the second to last episode that she feels the hand in hers. She feels her breath pause, her own hand clench tight as though to prevent the escape of what she feels there, solid and warm and real, and she does not dare turn her head to look. Time outside her stops with her next breath. "I never wanted you to know," says Madoka, Madoka herself, her own voice at last after all these years and lives and worlds. "I’m sorry, Homura." And with that, Homura can turn, never letting go, and look at her, and fling herself into Madoka’s arms.

"Don’t be sorry," she says. "It’s not your fault." And then, "I knew. I think I always knew. She got stronger every time, I kept thinking this time I was strong enough, it would be different this time, but she would always be stronger too. It had to be me." She’s sobbing now, and she thinks Madoka is too. "What I don’t understand is, _how_. I never despaired, I turned back time before my soul gem changed, I don’t _remember_ . . ."

"Because of me," Madoka whispers. "You don’t remember because of me. I found you, it was just once, in one time in all the universes, but it was enough. I found you, and I did . . . something different. Because it was Homura, and I didn’t want for Homura to leave the world. I . . . even I don’t know what I did, only that I did it. And what happened, because somehow I let you fall."

On the screen Ijiri Haruka is falling, and the Walpurgisnacht is rising out of her, its sweet chiming laughter rising like a storm, and like a song of triumph. "You were right, though," Homura says, gripping Madoka harder than ever, as if the force of her hands could show Madoka the truth of her words. "You see that, don’t you? I had to be the one, you had to let me despair, once in all the worlds. I was the one who could weave the worlds together, until you had the strength from all of them to save us.

"But you were always strong, Madoka. It needed the Walpurgisnacht to kill you. And it needed your death, for me to make my contract."

She feels Madoka nodding. "We had to do it together," Madoka says. Her voice is soft in Homura’s ear. "It was the only way, no matter how much it hurt, how many times we cried . . ."

Her words spark a memory, one of the many: Madoka standing before Kyubei in the world that was, stating her terms for her contract. "Madoka," she says, and makes herself straighten to look at her. "What happens now, when Puella Magi leave the world? When they vanish — we vanish —"

"They come to join me, and I meet them in the air." Madoka smiles now, even through her tears. "Saving all of us in all the worlds, forever — it’s a big job, you knew it would be. Where I am now —" She stops again, seeming to search for words. "There’s work to be done, for those who want to help. And sleep for those who are ready to lay down their powers and rest. And — no one else remembers all the worlds, or the way it was before, but there’s memory there. Mami and Sayaka and Kyoko, they think of you. I think they will all be awake when you come."

She could weep at the words, but that would be foolish now. "Madoka," she says again. "Do you remember when you made your contract with Kyubei? You said that you would change everything, that you wouldn’t let the Puella Magi cry.

"You did it, Madoka. _We_ did it. The world isn’t perfect, there will be darkness always, but we did it, you saved us all." Madoka is too bright to look at for long, and Homura has to look away for a moment to steady herself. On the screen, towers are falling, the Puella Magi are dying, and the thing that had been Ijiri Haruka’s sweet laughter still rises over the destruction. She steels herself, and looks back to the real Madoka.

"Madoka," she says again. "Why are we the only ones still weeping?" And leans in, at last, to kiss away Madoka’s tears.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel somewhat apologetic about the appearance of Christian references in a story for a fest specifically intended to highlight Asian sources. But as a matter of canon, Homura's early education was at a mission school, and there's imagery that resonates with Christian themes in other parts of the anime as well. Um, sorry?


End file.
